… collapse.
A quarter of a millennium after the Meditations and fifteen hundred years before The Decline of the West, Salvian, a priest of Marseilles, described the process whereby the free citizens of Rome were gradually reduced to a condition of serfdom. The upper classes had arranged the tax laws to their own convenience and then administered them crookedly to their further convenience. The entire burden of supporting the army—Rome’s army, of course, was vast, a nation within a nation—fell on the shoulders of the poor. The poor grew poorer. Finally, reduced to utter destitution, some fled from their villages to live among the barbarians, even though (as Salvian notes) they did give off a dreadful odor. Others, living far from the frontiers, became bagaudae, or homemade vandals. The majority, however, rooted to the land by their property and families, had to accept the terms of the rich potentiores, to whom they made over their houses, their lands, their possessions, and at last the freedom of their children. The birth rate declined. All Italy became a wasteland. Repeatedly the Emperors were obliged to invite the politer barbarians across the borders to “colonize” the abandoned farms.
The condition of the cities at this time was even less agreeable than that of the countryside. Burned and pillaged by barbarians and then by the troops (themselves mostly recruits from lands bordering the Danube) that had been sent in to dispel these invaders, the cities existed, if at all, in ruins. “Though doubtless no one wished to die,” Salvian writes, “still no one did anything to avoid death,” and he welcomes the advent of the Goths into Gaul and Spain as being a release from the despotism of a totally corrupt government.
My dear Gargilius,
Alexa wrote.
It’s one of those days and has been for weeks. Rain, mud, and rumors of Radiguesis north of the city, west of the city, east of the city, everywhere at once. The slaves fret and dither but so far only two have run off to enlist among our would-be conquerors. On the whole we’ve done better than our neighbors. Arcadius has nothing left now but that cook of his who has such a mistaken notion of garlic (the one person who should have joined the barbarians!) and the Egyptian girl Merriam brought with her. The poor thing speaks no known language and probably hasn’t been told the world is coming to an end. As for the two we lost, Patrobas always was a troublemaker and so good riddance. I’m sorry to tell you the other one was Timarchus, whom you had had such hopes for. He went into one of his snits and shattered the left arm of the wrestler down by the pool. Then he had no choice but to leave. Or perhaps it was the other way round—he smashed up the statue as a gesture of farewell. Anyhow, Sylvan says it can be repaired, though the damage will always be visible.
My own confidence in the Army is undiminished, darling, but I think it wisest that I close the villa till the rumors have abated somewhat. I shall get Sylvan—whom else can I trust now?—to help me bury the plate and the bedposts and the three remaining jugs of Falernian somewhere quite secret (as we discussed the last time). The books, those that matter, I’ll bring with me. I wish there were even a morsel of good news. Except for being lonely, I am in good health and good spirits. I do wish you were not so many miles …
She crossed out “miles” and wrote “stadia.”
… stadia away.
For a moment in the mirror of art, for the blinking of an iris, Alex a witnessed her life the wrong way round. Instead of a modern house-wife fantasying herself in classical poses, the past stiffened and became actual and she thought she could see clearly, across the span of years, the other Alexa, the sad contemporary self she usually managed to avoid, a shrill woman in a silly dress who had been equal to the small demands neither of her marriage nor of her career. A failure or (which was possibly worse) a mediocrity.
“And yet,” she told herself.
And yet: didn’t the world, to keep on going, need just such people as she was? It had only been a moment. The question had restored a comfortable perspective, and she would end her epistle to Gargilius with some chilly, true-to-life endearment. She would write—
But her pen had disappeared. It was not on the desk, it was not on the rug, it was not in her pocket.
The upstairs noise had begun.
Two minutes to twelve. She might reasonably complain, but she didn’t know who lived in the apartment above, or even for certain that that was where the sound came from. “Cheng-cheng,” and then, after a pause, “Cheng-cheng.”
“Alexa?” She could not place the voice (a woman’s?) summoning her. There was no one in the room.
“Alexa.”
Tancred stood in the doorway, looking a perfect cupid with an old silky shawl knotted at his hips, lemon on chocolate.
“You startled me.”
Her left hand had lifted automatically to her lips, and there, lapsing back into existence, was the ballpoint.
“I couldn’t sleep. What time is it?”
He stepped toward the table soundlessly and stood with one hand resting on the arm of a chair, his shoulders level with hers, his eyes steady as a laser beam.
“Midnight.”
“Could we play a game of cards?”
“And what about tomorrow?”
“Oh, I’ll get up. I promise.”
G., when he begged a favor, always smiled; Tancred, a better tactician, remained perfectly solemn.
“Well, get out the cards. One game and then we both have to get to bed.”
While Tancred was out of the room, Alexa tore out her own pages from “What the Moon Means to Me.” A face clipped from a news magazine came unstuck and fluttered to the rug. She stooped and got it.
“What were you writing?” Tancred asked, beginning, neatly, to shuffle.
“Nothing. A poem.”
“I wrote a poem,” he admitted, excusing hers.
She cut. He began to deal.
She studied the newsprint face. It seemed oddly devoid of experience despite its years, like a very young actor got up as a very old man. The eyes regarded the camera lens with the equanimity of a star.
Finally she had to ask: “Who is this?”
“That! You don’t know who that is? Guess.”
“Some singer?” (Could it be Don Hershey? Already?)
“It’s the last astronaut. You know, the three who landed on the moon. the other two are both dead.” Tank took the scrap of paper from her and returned it to its place in his project. “Now he is too, I guess. You start.”
4
From Roman times until the closing years of the 20th Century the Bay of Morbihan on the southern coast of Brittany had been the source of the world’s most delectable seed oysters. Then in the late 80’s the oystermen of Locmariaquere were alarmed to notice that their seedlings sickened when they were transplanted and that soon even those that remained in their native waters had become unpalatable. Researchers hired by the departement of Morbihan eventually tracked down the source of infection to wastes dumped into the estuary of the Loire, some sixty miles down the coast. (Ironically, the polluter was a subsidiary branch of the pharmaceutical concern that had supplied the investigators.) By the time this was discovered, sad to say, the Morbihan oyster was extinct. However, in death the species bequeathed mankind its final inestimable gift, a monomolecular pearl, Morbehanine.
As synthesized by Pfizer, Morbehanine quickly became the most popular drug in all countries where it was not prohibited usually in some gentling combination with the traditional. Modified by narcotizing agents it was marketed as Oraline; with caffeine it became Koffee; with tranquilizers Fadeout. In its crude form it was used only by the half million or so members of the intellectual elite who practiced Historical Analysis. Unmodified Morbihanine induces a state of intensely experienced “daydreaming ” in which usual relationships of figure-to-field are reversed. During a common hallucinogenic high the self remains a constant while the environment, as in dreams, undergoes transformation. With Morbehanine the landscape that one inhabits, after the initial “fixing” period, is not much more malleable than our own everyday world, but one is aware of one’s slightest action in this landscape as a free, spontaneous, willed choice. It was possible to dream responsibly.